In the previous sections, we looked at the following sentence elements:
Subject S
Verb V
Subject complement SC
Direct object DO
Indirect object IO
Object complement OC
These elements combine to form the five basic sentence patterns shown in Table 1.
Notice that the elements S (subject) and V (verb) are present in all the patterns. This means that all sentences contain at least a subject and a verb. There is one exception to this: imperative sentences like
Look! and Move over! have a verb, but no subject
The audience (S) applauded (V).
The temperature (S) dropped (V).
2 S+V+SC Linking My tea (S) is (V) cold (SC).
My friend (S) is (V) ill (SC).
David (S) seems (V) unhappy (SC).
Subject S
Verb V
Subject complement SC
Direct object DO
Indirect object IO
Object complement OC
These elements combine to form the five basic sentence patterns shown in Table 1.
Notice that the elements S (subject) and V (verb) are present in all the patterns. This means that all sentences contain at least a subject and a verb. There is one exception to this: imperative sentences like
Look! and Move over! have a verb, but no subject
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Table 1 Sentence patterns and ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
Sentence Verb Examples
pattern type
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1 S+V Intransitive Amy (S) laughed (V).
The audience (S) applauded (V).
The temperature (S) dropped (V).
2 S+V+SC Linking My tea (S) is (V) cold (SC).
My friend (S) is (V) ill (SC).
David (S) seems (V) unhappy (SC).
3 S+V+DO Transitive The soldiers (S) destroyed (V) the village (DO).
The police (S) interviewed (V) the suspects (DO).
The storm (S) caused (V) a lot of damage (DO).
4 S+V+IO+DO Transitive We (S) gave (V) David (IO) the prize (DO) .
They (S) awarded (V) James (IO)a salary increase (DO).
I (S) asked (V) him (IO) a question (DO).
5 S+V+DO+OC Transitive The dye (S) turned (V) the water (DO) blue (OC).
His comments (S) made (V) me (DO) angry (OC).
They (S) elected (V) Amy (DO) President (OC
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Key: S = subject; V = verb; SC = subject complement;
DO = direct object; IO = indirect object; OC = object complement
DO = direct object; IO = indirect object; OC = object complement
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